extraordinary%20encounters

102 Fairies encountered
sense.” He found his way back to open air,
and the voices and the music ceased (Traum,
1972). Traum’s experience is like many recounted
in the tradition. Fairies are reputed to
drive trespassers off their home turf and, also,
to love music. Both folk fiddlers and at least
one classical composer (Thomas Wood) claim
to have heard fairy music; a nineteenth-century
Manx fiddler, William Cain, was not
alone in learning such a melody and incorporating
it into his repertoire.
The American Indian tribes had their own
versions of fairy traditions, but the Europeans
who settled the North American continent—
except for places where Celtic customs took
firm root, such as Newfoundland—fairly
quickly discarded their own. Nonetheless, occasional
incidents in which fairylike figures
appeared, even if not identified by the witness
as such, have allegedly occurred. All of his life,
Harry Anderson remembered something that
had happened to him one summer night in
1919, when he was walking alone down a
rural road near Barron, Wisconsin. To his
considerable surprise, his solitary stroll was interrupted
by the approach of twenty little
men trooping in single file under the bright
moonlight. They were heading in his direction.
Everything about them was odd: they
were shirtless, bald, pale-faced, and dressed in
leather knee pants. “Mumbling” sounds came
out of their mouths; yet they did not seem to
be talking with each other. As they passed the
young man, they seemed oblivious of or indifferent
to his presence. By now Anderson was
so unnerved that he continued on his way
without ever looking back.
In Canby, Oregon, one day in April 1950,
Ellen Jonerson was working on her lawn when
she happened to glance over at her neighbor’s
yard and saw a bizarre sight: a twelve-inch little
man of stocky build with a tanned face; he
was clad in overalls and plaid shirt. He had
what looked like a skullcap on his head. Jonerson
ran inside to make a quick call about it
to a friend. When she returned, the figure was
walking away with a “waddling” motion. He
passed under a parked car and was seen no
more. At no time did the idea that she was
seeing what some would call a “fairy” enter
Jonerson’s mind, and her report is generally
thought of as a UFO-related close encounter
of the third kind, though no UFO was seen.
Inevitably, some have called UFO encounters
a modern form of fairy belief. Among the
first to do so was Jacques Vallee, author of
Passport to Magonia (1969).Vallee offered an
occult-oriented interpretation that speculated
that an incomprehensible otherworld has interacted
with humankind for thousands of
years, producing manifestations that are filtered
through human consciousness and expectation,
thus changing to reflect different
times and cultures. (Kirk had concluded as
much in the late seventeenth century. Fairies,
of a “middle nature between man and angel,”
dress and speak “like the people and country
under which they live” [Sanderson, 1976].)
Vallee went so far as to declare flatly—if, as
critics charged, hyperbolically—that “the
modern, global belief in flying saucers and
their occupants is identical to an earlier belief
in the fairy-faith. The entities described as the
pilots of the craft are indistinguishable from
the elves, sylphs, and lutins.” Debunkers such
as Robert Sheaffer have employed a different
sort of argument to the effect that flying
saucers and their occupants are as much a
delusion as fairies and fairyland. Neither approach,
however, seems a wholly adequate
way of explaining the mysteries inherent in
such encounters, which paradoxically offer up
“real”-seeming encounters with things that almost
certainly do not exist in the conventional
understanding of the verb.
Fairies have found new life among New
Age visionaries and channelers and other explorers
of the far edges of consciousness. One
writer remarks, “There are two major differences
between the old oral traditional or ancestral
faery contacts and those of contemporary
humanity removed from oral
tradition. . . . The first is that while our ancestors
often sought to break away from the faery
realm, many modern contacts are intentional.
They are induced or encouraged by various